Next to my study I’m making some money once in a while with being gp-assistant and doing nursing tasks for people in their home situation (e.g. helping them eat, washing and dressing them, give medication etc.). While doing the last the other day, i found myself in quite an interesting situation:
The client was a ca 40 year old man, who’s more or less restricted to bed rest for a terminal illness. I had to apply a crème on his intertrigo/shaving lesions to cure them / prevent them of getting worse. Since i didn’t know this client, i asked him for some directions on where to find his lesions. Here is where it gets interesting. He wanted me to apply the substance on his bum-cheeks, his groins (very normal so far) and his prostate……..?? Instantly my brain started to evaluate the situation. Did this guy ask me to do a, for this circumstance, very inappropriate act; or did he have no clue on where to find his own prostate? (In case you’re not familiar with this, the only way for me to reach his prostate in this situation was to insert my finger in his ass…) Taking everything into account I decided it was not fare to judge the guy for the first option if i didn’t rule out the second one first. So i had to make clear what exactly he meant with prostate. Luckily for the situation he meant his scrotum, and i managed to find this out without embarrassing him with his lack of knowledge of his own anatomy.
Though i think this little anecdote is a quite funny example, i sometimes wonder about the lack of knowledge people have of their own bodies. I think that people would respect their body a lot more if they were roughly more aware of (the function of) their own organs. And if they have more respect for this beautiful system, maybe they will take care of it a little bit better…
There you are, that was my little reflection for today’s post.
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